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05/30/2006

Well, it appears that the first OPC is slowly coming to a close. In order to give everyone the chance to post a final comment or remark, we will leave the comment threads open for another two weeks. After that, you will be able to view the comment threads but not participate in them. So if you have been meaning to make a final point or put forth yet another objection, make haste! In the meantime, we just wanted to thank everyone once again for playing along. As we mentioned before, we have already received several helpful suggestions concerning ways to improve the conference. Hopefully, more of you will send your ideas along.

For now, we are tentatively planning to have OPC 2 just before the upcoming winter break. Improvements will include: (a) direct links to html versions of all papers, (b) links to authors' and commentators' homepages in the posts, (c) webcast (or at least audio/video file) of keynote paper being read (and hopefully a few others as well), and (d) a maximum of ten papers which will be uploaded five per week for two weeks. There are a few other ideas we are flirting with as well. We are committed to making sure future installations of the OPC are even more enjoyable and beneficial than the first one. Suggestions can either be posted as comments to this post or sent to the OPC email address.

05/23/2006

It's the fourth and final week of the OPC. The first three weeks have been pretty successful with nearly 20,000 page views and several very active and productive exchanges of ideas. This week we have even more papers than in the previous weeks, so surely there will be a few papers that catch your eye. We look forward to once again hearing from everyone in the comment threads! For now, we wanted to thank you for playing along in this on-line experiment. We are well aware that things could have been both easier to navigate and more sophisticated technologically speaking. Next year we hope to have fewer papers--so that each paper gets the attention it deserves--and perhaps some audio and audio/video files for people to download. Minimally, we would like to kick off the conference with a web-cast of a paper being read. For now, we are open to suggestions concerning how to improve things in ways that maximally utilize the on-line format. A number of people have already given us some good ideas (e.g., using links to message boards, papers all converted to html, audio-video files, chat rooms, and webcam chats, to name a few). We look forward to hearing more suggestions. In the meantime, we wanted to thank you once again for playing along. Hopefully, it's been both fun and beneficial to everyone.

Elizabeth Harman (New York University), "The Mistake in "I'll Be Glad I Did It" Reasoning: The Significance of Future Desires,” with commentary by Brook Sadler (University of South Florida). Both the paper and the reply can be found here.

Terence Horgan (University of Arizona), “Materialism: Matters of Definition, Defense, and Deconstruction,” with commentary by Thomas Polger (University of Cincinnati). Both the paper, commentary, and reply can be found here.

Adam Pautz (University of Texas—Austin), “Externalist Intentionalism and Optimal Conditions: A Comment on Byrne and Tye,” with commentary by Bill Lycan (University of North Carolina). The paper, commentary, and response can be found here.

Sharon Street (New York University), “Evolution and the Schizophrenia of Quasi-Realism About Normativity,” with commentary by David Enoch (Hebrew University). Both the paper and commentary can be found here.